The North Water feels like the result of an encounter between Joseph Conrad and Cormac McCarthy in some run-down port as they offer each other a long, sour nod of recognition ... McGuire has an extraordinary talent for picturing a moment, offering precise, sharp, cinematic details. When he has to describe complex action, he manages the physicality with immense clarity. He writes about violence with unsparing color and, at times, a sort of relish. The writing moves sometimes from the poetic to the purple, but McGuire is careful not to use too many metaphors or similes or too much fancy writing when he needs to make clear what cold feels like, or hunger or fear.
It's the poetic precision of McGuire's harsh vision of the past that makes his novel such a standout. I suggested that initial Melville comparison because of McGuire's detailed accounts of whaling, of course, but he's more in line with Gothic writers like Mary Shelly and Poe who imagined the blank wastes of the Arctic as a kind of frozen hell. Like Sumner, we readers are enticed on board The Volunteer and then find ourselves swept along on what turns out to be a voyage of the damned.
Mr. McGuire nimbly folds all these melodramatic developments into his story as it hurtles toward its conclusion. He has written an allusion-filled novel that still manages to feel original, a violent tale of struggle and survival in a cinematically beautiful landscape reminiscent of the movie The Revenant but rendered with far more immediacy and considerably less self-importance.
The strength of The North Water lies in its well-researched detail and persuasive descriptions of the cold, violence, cruelty and the raw, bloody business of whale-killing ... Violence is so prolific that it becomes routine. Any novel set on a whaler is bound to raise comparisons with Moby-Dick, and McGuire’s characters, caged as they are within their grim destinies, lack the superb elasticity and vitality that make Melville’s most tragic passages shine.
The characters, while drawn in interesting detail, are not all that morally complex. There is little doubt, for instance, how ferocious Henry Drax will be and remain throughout the narrative. The protagonist, Sumner, having experienced one moral failing in life, will always bring himself around to doing the right thing. The result is a story with dramatic external tension, where the weight of survival compels the characters to make decisions, but not one in which a character’s inner life or most closely held beliefs are challenged or transformed in a meaningful way. This yields a plot that is at points disappointingly predictable and formulaic, especially in the last few chapters.
Bold and frightening, The North Water offers many satisfactions and little comfort. Ice, wind, snow and water, whales, sharks and polar bears all menace its characters, but fellow humans prove the most dangerous ... Some scenes will remind current readers of The Revenant ... Readers of Cormac McCarthy know that beautiful writing and bloody murder go together as well now as they did in Homer, and Ian McGuire proves it.
This is a book full of very disgusting, evil men. Men who maybe aren’t as developed as I’d like, but men nonetheless. It’s okay to hate a book’s characters, but it’s not okay not to care about them at all. The North Water struggles with a cast of characters who aren't all fully fleshed out. This book is gruesome, but also intelligent. It's a literary horror novel with a punch. Imagine if Eli Roth directed an adaptation of Moby Dick.
